A. I grew up in Brooklyn, the eldest of three children. I started school young and skipped a couple of grades. I graduated from high school at 15.

I was kind of nerdy. I loved to read, I loved school and I loved exploring the city. My parents gave us a lot of latitude and let us explore the city. Back then, they felt the city was pretty safe.

Tell me more about your parents.

My mother was an elementary schoolteacher and my father was a biology professor. They both grew up in Charleston, S.C., and moved to New York looking for greater opportunities. That example of openness to adventure inspired me and gave me a willingness to take chances.

My mother always admonished us if we said mean things about people we didn’t like. She always would say that everybody has some good quality. I tend to be very literal-minded, so I developed this habit early on of looking at people, even when I wasn’t feeling terribly warmly toward them, to try to find that good quality about them.

My parents also raised us to never take our good fortune for granted or to be overly impressed with our own gifts, and to appreciate the fact that any success we had was the result of the sacrifices that people had made on our behalf.

When you went to college, did you have an idea what you wanted to do for a career?

I didn’t really. I knew that I was likely to be an English major. I loved languages so I took a lot of French. The pivotal decision that I made was to study abroad, in England.

That was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life because it turned me into a traveler. It gave me a high degree of confidence in my ability to adjust to completely different cultures.

You were a professor before taking on more administrative leadership roles. What made you decide to switch?

I loved teaching and mentoring students, but I also realized that I had the ability to make a difference in terms of creating communities that were more inclusive and that helped advance the institutional mission.

What were some early leadership lessons?

One takeaway was that I really needed to listen to people more carefully, however much I might think I knew what a situation required. I would see people getting in their own way and realize there was a different way to do this — that it would be useful to ask questions rather than just tell people what I thought at the outset.

I see a lot of situations as puzzles. I tend to be a good listener and very observant. Maybe that goes back to my experience of having grown up younger than my peers and trying to figure out how to read the room.

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It’s important to me to create an environment within my leadership team where people feel that they can trust each other and feel confident sharing their ideas, even if they seem unusual or seem to run counter to the way things typically have been done. I want them to feel that they can noodle ideas together, and can imagine alternate scenarios.

So how do you set that tone?

It’s important for me to be willing to make myself vulnerable, to put a crazy idea out there, and let people poke holes in it, just to let them know that it’s O.K. for us to be out on the fringe a little bit. I also am very clear that I don’t have all the answers, and so I try to be as open as I can to other people’s ideas.

Any surprises about the job of president?

I knew intellectually that I would need to be on pretty much all the time, especially in a small college in a small town. The neighbors want to get to know you, and that’s really important and great.

But what I did not expect is that role of the president in a small, liberal arts college is often sort of an emotional, symbolic center as well.

That means that when unexpected things happen in the community, people want me to say or write something that is intellectually appropriate but also heartfelt. They really want to know that the emotional center is authentic.

I’m not sure I appreciated that before I started. I don’t mind it at all, though. It requires me to be my better or higher self.

I’m looking for energy, imagination, creativity and evidence of an ability to work collaboratively. I tend to ask about problem-solving ability. So I would probably ask you to describe a situation in which you needed to come up with a solution to a problem that you’ve never seen before. How did you go about figuring out how to get to a solution? Did you believe you were successful? And how do you understand failure in that context?

It’s important that people who work for me understand that failure is not a death sentence, and that it’s an important part of learning. It’s part of every job.

What career and life advice do you give to new college graduates?

I first want them to realize that in many ways they are freer at that moment, right out of college, than they are likely to be ever again. They should embrace that and be open to whatever opportunities that present themselves, especially those that are exciting or unusual or things that are going to stretch them a little bit.

That’s the moment for them to follow that path and see where it leads them. They have no way of knowing what the hidden lessons will be.

Each week, Adam Bryant talks with top executives about leadership. Follow him on Twitter: @nytcorneroffice. This interview has been edited for space and clarity.

A version of this article appears in print on February 19, 2017, on Page BU2 of the New York edition with the headline: Listen First, and Then Lead. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe